Journal Articles 1980–1999

Sunk Costs, Firm Size, and Internationalization. — One strand of the industrial organization literature argues that outlays on sunk costs are endogenous in market expansion, implying an adaptive adjus…

The expected consumer’s surplus (ECS) is often used as a monetary measure of consumer welfare. Examples include the theory of regulation, competition policy, and price stabilization. This paper shows…

A quality-adjusted measure of labour is developed, where labour efficiency depends on firm training. This specification is integrated into a flexible neoclassical cost function, representing the firm'…

In a recent review article, Agell et al. (ALO) [Agell, J., Lindh, T., Ohlsson, H., 1997. Growth and the public sector: a critical review essay. European Journal of Political Economy 13, 33–52.] claim…

In the models of Young (1993, Econometrica 61, 57–84; 1993, J. Econ. Theory 59, 145–168), boundedly rational individuals are recurrently matched to play a game, and they play myopic best replies to th…

We incorporate transaction taxes in a housing market search model with endogeneous house prices and show that these taxes unambiguously create lock-in effects that reduce welfare. The lock-in effects…

This paper analyzes the interplay between social norms and economic incentives in the context of work decisions in the modem welfare state. We assume that to live off one's own work is a social norm,…

What forces determine national differences in the size and industry distribution of employment? We stress the role of the economic policy environment as determined by business taxes, employment securi…

The purpose of the present paper is twofold. First, we formulate a general method of identifying clusters of economic activity in a country or region. The methodology is based on generally available i…

In this paper it is argued that the size distribution of firms may largely be determined by institutional factors. This hypothesis is tested in an exploratory fashion by studying the evolution of the…

MUST (Macroeconomic Uncertainty Strategy) analysis can help identify the demand side of competitive intelligence. It is a key tool by which relevant economic variables can be identified for companies.…

National and International Spillovers from R&D: Comparing a Neoclassical and an Endogenous Growth Approach.— Two models where productivity growth is caused by spillovers from R&D are analyzed…

This paper analyzes how usual measures of revealed factor abundance (RFA), based on trade in merchandise, are affected by the existence of trade in services of intangible assets; trade that is mainly…

By perturbing symmetric coordination games à la Bryant [Bryant, J., 1983. Quarterly Journal of Economics 98, 525–528] we derive unique solutions, the noise-proof equilibria. Our results agree with the…

Three empirical models for the choice of entry mode in foreign direct investment are compared. In contrast to the models used in earlier studies where the entry decision is taken to be predetermined,…

Theoretical studies have shown that capital gains taxes in the housing market may create lock-in effects, but, so far, no empirical evidence has been presented regarding the size of these effects. For…

Based on the notion of affiliation a model is developed which suggests that laws which restrict the firm's flexibility to adjust its employment force resume in higher requirements on potential employe…

We compare the relation between foreign affiliate production and parent employment in US manufacturing multinationals with that in Swedish firms. US multinationals appear to have allocated some of the…

We use a specific-factor model to examine the conditions under which policy-makers are able to increase aggregate production of high-tech goods by production or R&D-subsidies in the short and long…

Given a compulsory pension system, we calculate the optimal ratio of marginal contributions to benefits. This ratio is independent of the labor supply elasticity, it increases in the rate of return in…

R&D externalities can imply ranges of aggregate increasing returns to scale in R&D. As a consequence several equilibria can exist involving different numbers of firms and different R&D inv…

This paper deals with the effects of European integration in the EC and EFTA on economic growth. Base regressions suggest that EC and EFTA memberships do in fact have a positive and significant effect…

This paper asks whether net trade in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) can be explained by differences in comparative costs and in the exploitation of scale economies. Based on a sample of six c…

This paper analyzes the utilization of R&D results in the home and foreign plants of Swedish multinational enterprises (MNEs). The findings indicate that firms' R&D undertaken in the home coun…

The increased use of equity issues on both domestic and foreign capital markets from the early 1980s raises the research question addressed in this article: What are the significant reasons for raisin…

The main issue addressed in this paper concerns the relationship between firms' endowments in intangible proprietary assets and their export performance. The impact of investments in foreign productio…

A class of evolutionary selection dynamics is defined, and the defining property, convex monotonicity, is shown to be sufficient and essentially necessary for the elimination of strictly dominated pur…

Effects of Overseas Production on Home Country Exports: Evidence Based on Swedish Multinationals. —Using unique data on Swedish multinationals 1974–1990, the impacts of overseas production on parent e…

By combining unique data on Swedish multinationals with industry data for 18 countries, the influence of host country characteristics on the location of foreign production is analysed. Particular atte…

This paper studies how product differentiation affects collusive pricing in a duopoly when products are horizontally differentiated and firms compete in prices. In contrast to earlier work, the punish…

There is no simple relationship between internationalization of firms' operations and expanding trade. The variation in exports from Swedish affiliates is here shown to be influenced by properties rel…

This paper models a private goods oligopoly market characterized by negative and reciprocal externalities. Although firms compete in prices, and products are undifferentiated in equilibrium, the price…

A central concept in evolutionary game theory is that of an evolutionarily stable strategy. However, many games of interest for economics have only strategies which meet the weaker requirement of neut…

Volvo Cars' economic exposure to exchange rates and other macroeconomic variables is estimated using quarterly cash flows as the firm's target variable. We discuss first several issues relating to man…

This paper investigates stability properties of evolutionary selection dynamics in normal-form games. The analysis is focused on deterministic dynamics in continuous time and on asymptotic stability o…

Reciprocal shareholding has been argued to increase managerial power and facilitate takeover resistance. The latter may translate into higher premiums in the event of an actual takeover, thus benefiti…

We show how an extended theory of fair wages can be incorporated in the two-by-two Heckscher-Ohlin model. An important feature of the model is the existence of involuntary unemployment. Several result…

An interview survey was designed to explore how personnel managers and senior wage negotiators respond to popular models of the labor market. As in Blinder and Choi (1990), our results indicate that r…

This paper examines the incentives to differentiate products horizontally in a repeated game when redesigning costs are negligible. The main findings are the following. If firms are patient with respe…

The quality of researchers' work in economics and other sciences is generally evaluated through a system of peer review. In an experimental test it is shown that the peer review system can be very ine…

This paper studies pricing and capacity decisions in markets for phone-ordered taxicabs. Taxi firms first choose capacities and then compete in prices. As firm demand increases, so does waiting time.…

In this study the additional effect of social capital over and above the contribution of human capital on the income attainment of managers is explored A regression analysis of a 1985 sample of III ex…

This paper provides additional insight on the Lilien 1982 sectoral shift hypothesis (Lilien (1983), Abraham and Katz (1986), Samson (1986), Neelin (1987)) by applying it to Swedish data. Lilien claime…

This paper examines the relationship between product differentiation and the sustainability of collusive pricing in markets for vertically differentiated products. The main finding is that collusion i…

The usual justifications of non-cooperative solution criteria are rationalistic in nature, building on individual rationality and expectation-coordination postulates. In contrast, the ‘as if’ approach…

In the traditional Keynesian and classical models, the transmission of product demand changes to the labour market generally involves wage-price sluggishness or counter-cyclical real wage movements. I…

The deregulatory 1980s exhibits a dramatic increase in outward foreign direct investment (FDI) from a number of small countries outside the EC. Few studies have analyzed home country effects of outwar…

To assess alternative forms of ownership of firms and allocation of capital, the standard incentive argument is complemented and qualified by an argument considering competence. Regarding capital as a…

This paper is a first empirical application of the 1988 Riordan and Staiger paper, which showed that in the presence of informational asymmetries between current and potential employees about workers…

This article presents an equilibrium model of a dual labor market. Firms are assumed to be identical ex ante, and dualism arises endogenously. The dual labor market outcome is supported by efficiency…

In this paper we describe how restricted vector autoregressions can be employed to examine the sources of macroeconomic fluctuations. We show how cointegration restrictions can be used to identify a V…

When trade is heavily restricted, a small country may show a "false" comparative disadvantage in differentiated products at an early stage in the life cycle, because firms are confined to a small dome…

A new criterion for self-enforcement is developed which requires that every player's strategy should be at least locally ptimal at each of his information sets under some probabilistic hypothesis abou…

This paper examines the problem of non-existence of a single-wage equilibrium in a simple search model with asymmetric information. A pure-strategy, symmetric Nash equilibrium fails to exist because a…

We specify a two-sector general equilibrium model with fair wages and involuntary unemployment. In determining the fair wage, workers care not only about relative wages but also about the functional d…

How to transform a failed socialist economy raises questions about the processes of structural and institutional changes, which standard economics is inadequately equipped to study. An economic theory…

Produclivity measurement is considered in the context of incomplete output information. Only a value measure of output is assumed to be available, which is typical for many service industries. Input m…

This paper utilizes data from a Swedish household survey for 1984 (the HUS data) in combination with data on public child care fees and spaces per child by community. We argue that the subsidy rate an…

Migration flows in the integrated Nordic labor market are heavily dominated by Finnish migrationto Sweden.Differencesin migrationbehavioracrossthe Nordicpopulationsare identified. Elasticities of migr…

It is shown that when the effects of an increase in unemployment subsidies are studied in a general equilibrium framework, unemployment increases far less than in a "partial-partial" model. In fact, t…